This article is the first formal investigation of consumer attitudes that compares the forecasting power of the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment and the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index. The authors find that measures available from the Conference Board have both...

We develop a structural model of retail store choices for which household shopping plans and price beliefs are endogenously determined. In our model individual households make their store choices based on their expected basket costs, which are determined by their shopping plans and price...

This paper examines the different ways that economists have characterized the empirical content of modern consumer choice theory. There has been general agreement among economists that each stage in the development of the theory – from early neoclassical, to ordinal utility, and on to revealed...

Michael Marx, senior director, Visa Research Insights, conducted a workshop in 2009 at the Payment Cards Center (PCC) as the economy was emerging from a recession. At that time, it appeared that the recession had affected consumer payment preferences, especially those related to cash and credit...

Michael Marx, senior director, Visa Research Insights, conducted a workshop in 2009 at the Payment Cards Center (PCC) as the economy was emerging from a recession. At that time, it appeared that the recession had affected consumer payment preferences, especially those related to cash and credit...

When physically similar products, of similar quality, are offered by retailers both online and offline, we often observe that the dispersion in prices of these products online is greater than the price dispersion offline. This observation runs counter to early theories that suggested price...

The work analyses the writings of Shibani, considering their relevance for contemporary Islamic economics. The novelty of Shibani's earnings model is its integration of Zakat and other social giving in the social welfare function, which makes the consumer utility a multi-dimensional devotional,...

Using scanner data and time diaries, we document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production. We find evidence that there is substantial heterogeneity in prices paid across households for identical consumption goods in the same metro area at any given point in...

The aggregate trade in the market in a community must be accounted for per period of time. As such, the market consists of “flows.” Specifically, the flow of quantity traded is determined after interactions between the two flows of demand schedule and supply schedule; the former slopes...

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children’s intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children’s present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...